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This is just a cartoon I made based on some notes a colleague took regarding the short, hectic life of a resident female [i]Pteromys.[/i] I don’t really draw that much, but these were fun! I’d like to get better.\n\nI included a transcript of the notes, with permission from the original author:\n\n\n[i]“The prospective resident’s first few days, upon arriving at a bustling new colony, are spent establishing herself socially. She helps nurse colony young, forages for the communal food store, and practices her new colony’s theme songs. After this introductory period, the female enters estrus for the first and only time in her life and aggressively solicits sexual attention from the colony’s single adult male. If he rejects her, the unattended estrus will progress to the invariably fatal reproductive wasting disease, but rejections are made rarely and usually only in cases of an obviously sick, infested or seriously injured applicant.\n\nMore frequently, the female’s display provokes a cascade of affectionate and attentive behavior from the male including the actual transfer of his genetic material to her body. This takes about fifteen minutes during which the female lies still as the male relaxes a seminal bladder and allows semen to flow into her reproductive tract, which expands as it fills like a water balloon attached to a faucet. Only a small portion of the male’s sperm is used for the initial fertilization; the rest is stored in a special vessel within the female’s body and will be used to produce future litters. The act of copulation draws voyeuristic attention from onlookers, which are visibly and vocally excited for the induction of the new resident.\n\nAfter fertilizing the diminutive female, the colony male will spend hours bonding and socializing with her. She instinctively turns her attention to his genitals, lapping up any excess fluid from their conjoining. The stimulation causes the male to excrete a supplementary substance from his penis that is similar in consistency to semen but different in composition. It is summarily devoured by the female while the male churrs and sings to her. We aren’t one hundred percent sure what the function of this substance is, but we hypothesize that it contains material needed by her brain to manufacture the complex dopamine-derived neurotransmitter that services her enormous reward center. By the time the bonding session concludes, the female smells exactly like her male and is ready to take her place as a permanent resident of her new colony.\n\nThe life of a resident female is energetically expensive and, in consequence, short. After being fertilized, her body will begin quickly manufacturing daughters using the colony male’s genetic signature. As soon as this litter (which may consist of eight to thirteen) is born, her reproductive system starts on another batch using a tiny portion of the semen stored inside her body. This keeps her in a state of constant production. She almost stops excreting entirely, as nearly everything she eats and drinks is efficiently used to support fetal growth as well as to produce milk for neonates. The cycle continues until the female’s energy reserves are depleted, and she expires. Eighty percent of all resident females perish within six months of joining a new colony, while less than two percent achieve an anniversary. The relatively biologically untaxed male, for comparison, will outlive them all and oversee his colony for eight to ten years, witnessing the lives and deaths of his little female workers on the scale of gross tragedy.\n\nOn the surface, this reproductive strategy may indeed seem tragic, or even barbaric. It is seemingly a perfect polarization of sex roles: the male contributes energetically cheap genetic material to many dozens of females, which each invest energy so heavily into his offspring that it eventually kills them.\n\nI will conclude these notes with two more observations to thoughtfully consider. The first is that, despite her short life, the resident female is, without question, reproductively successful. Sensationally so for a mammal, in fact. She may pass their motherly genes on to more than sixty daughters throughout her life (and perhaps even a male, if she wins the genetic lottery), even if she is never able to see them leave the colony to find new families of their own. In addition, evidence suggests that this is all extremely physically rewarding for the female; she has a pleasure center the size of a watermelon and it lights up like wildfire during her initial insemination, with spikes during parturition and suckling. She is entirely designed to be an efficient vessel for genetic replication and, what’s more, she seems to be designed to enjoy the work.\n\nFinally, the death of a resident female affects the entire colony in surprising ways. If the male is not otherwise distracted, he will detect when a resident is on her last legs and move her away from the chaotic nursery. They will spend her final hours together in a heartbreaking cuddle as he sings of his gratitude to her, keeping her calm and encouraged as she passes on. This is all getting a little too anthropomorphic even for me, but that’s what I felt was happening as I witnessed the behavior.\n\nIt would appear from an outsider’s perspective that resident females live stressed, painful and thankless lives, but in reality the opposite may be true. Their bodies are engineered to cope with the acute stresses of constant reproduction, their days are spent in ecstasy and contentment, and the services they provide throughout their short, happy lives are all that keep the squirrel factory--and the species--in the black.\n\n\t-- F”[/i]", "description_bbcode_parsed": "First upload!! This is just a cartoon I made based on some notes a colleague took regarding the short, hectic life of a resident female Pteromys. I don’t really draw that much, but these were fun! I’d like to get better.

I included a transcript of the notes, with permission from the original author:


“The prospective resident’s first few days, upon arriving at a bustling new colony, are spent establishing herself socially. She helps nurse colony young, forages for the communal food store, and practices her new colony’s theme songs. After this introductory period, the female enters estrus for the first and only time in her life and aggressively solicits sexual attention from the colony’s single adult male. If he rejects her, the unattended estrus will progress to the invariably fatal reproductive wasting disease, but rejections are made rarely and usually only in cases of an obviously sick, infested or seriously injured applicant.

More frequently, the female’s display provokes a cascade of affectionate and attentive behavior from the male including the actual transfer of his genetic material to her body. This takes about fifteen minutes during which the female lies still as the male relaxes a seminal bladder and allows semen to flow into her reproductive tract, which expands as it fills like a water balloon attached to a faucet. Only a small portion of the male’s sperm is used for the initial fertilization; the rest is stored in a special vessel within the female’s body and will be used to produce future litters. The act of copulation draws voyeuristic attention from onlookers, which are visibly and vocally excited for the induction of the new resident.

After fertilizing the diminutive female, the colony male will spend hours bonding and socializing with her. She instinctively turns her attention to his genitals, lapping up any excess fluid from their conjoining. The stimulation causes the male to excrete a supplementary substance from his penis that is similar in consistency to semen but different in composition. It is summarily devoured by the female while the male churrs and sings to her. We aren’t one hundred percent sure what the function of this substance is, but we hypothesize that it contains material needed by her brain to manufacture the complex dopamine-derived neurotransmitter that services her enormous reward center. By the time the bonding session concludes, the female smells exactly like her male and is ready to take her place as a permanent resident of her new colony.

The life of a resident female is energetically expensive and, in consequence, short. After being fertilized, her body will begin quickly manufacturing daughters using the colony male’s genetic signature. As soon as this litter (which may consist of eight to thirteen) is born, her reproductive system starts on another batch using a tiny portion of the semen stored inside her body. This keeps her in a state of constant production. She almost stops excreting entirely, as nearly everything she eats and drinks is efficiently used to support fetal growth as well as to produce milk for neonates. The cycle continues until the female’s energy reserves are depleted, and she expires. Eighty percent of all resident females perish within six months of joining a new colony, while less than two percent achieve an anniversary. The relatively biologically untaxed male, for comparison, will outlive them all and oversee his colony for eight to ten years, witnessing the lives and deaths of his little female workers on the scale of gross tragedy.

On the surface, this reproductive strategy may indeed seem tragic, or even barbaric. It is seemingly a perfect polarization of sex roles: the male contributes energetically cheap genetic material to many dozens of females, which each invest energy so heavily into his offspring that it eventually kills them.

I will conclude these notes with two more observations to thoughtfully consider. The first is that, despite her short life, the resident female is, without question, reproductively successful. Sensationally so for a mammal, in fact. She may pass their motherly genes on to more than sixty daughters throughout her life (and perhaps even a male, if she wins the genetic lottery), even if she is never able to see them leave the colony to find new families of their own. In addition, evidence suggests that this is all extremely physically rewarding for the female; she has a pleasure center the size of a watermelon and it lights up like wildfire during her initial insemination, with spikes during parturition and suckling. She is entirely designed to be an efficient vessel for genetic replication and, what’s more, she seems to be designed to enjoy the work.

Finally, the death of a resident female affects the entire colony in surprising ways. If the male is not otherwise distracted, he will detect when a resident is on her last legs and move her away from the chaotic nursery. They will spend her final hours together in a heartbreaking cuddle as he sings of his gratitude to her, keeping her calm and encouraged as she passes on. This is all getting a little too anthropomorphic even for me, but that’s what I felt was happening as I witnessed the behavior.

It would appear from an outsider’s perspective that resident females live stressed, painful and thankless lives, but in reality the opposite may be true. Their bodies are engineered to cope with the acute stresses of constant reproduction, their days are spent in ecstasy and contentment, and the services they provide throughout their short, happy lives are all that keep the squirrel factory--and the species--in the black.

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